Quotes by Russian Authors - Page 3

They soon lost interest in Sofya. She was just one more prisoner -with no more idea of her destination than anyone else. No one asked her name and patronymic; no one remembered her surname. She realized with surprise that although the process of evolution had taken millions of years, these people had needed only a few days to revert to the state of cattle, dirty and unhappy, captive and nameless.
Vasily Grossman
IsoldA: The only way to be alone is to behave as though we are alone already.
Victor Pelevin
Writers are engineers of human souls.
Yury Olesha
Drink your coffee, it clears out the brain in the morning
Sergei Lukyanenko
Faith walks simply childlike between the darkness of human life and the hope of what is to come.
Catherine de Hueck Doherty
The memories of home and of her children rose up in her imagination with a peculiar charm quite new to her, with a sort of new brilliance. That world of her own seemed quite new to her now so sweet and precious that she would not on any account spend an extra day outside it, and she made up her mind that she would certainly go back next day.
Leo Tolstoy
Woman, don't you know, is such a subject that however much you study it, it's always perfectly new.
Leo Tolstoy
The flower, as he saw it, ruled over evil; it absorbed in itself all innocently shed blood (that is why it is so red) all tears and all the gall of humanity. It was an awful and mysterious being, the antitheses of God, an Ahriman presenting a most unassuming and innocent appearance. It was necessary to break it off and kill it. But this was not all; it was also necessary not to permit it at its death to discharge its evil upon the world.
Vsevolod Garshin
Every new time will give its law.
Maxim Gorky
She'll come, if not today, then tomorrow, but she'll find me. That's the cursed romanticism of all these pure hearts! Oh the vileness, oh the stupidity, oh the narrowness, of these rotten, sentimental souls
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I don't think I could love you so much if you had nothing to complain of and nothing to regret. I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and of little value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.
Boris Pasternak
I gave him my best cryptic smile. He did not fall down to his feet, kiss my shoes, and promise me the world. I must be getting rusty.
Ilona Andrews
I squinted at her. “You’re an adult.” “You’re an adult too.” “But you’re an older adult. You’ve had more practice.” Mom leaned back and laughed.
Ilona Andrews
After all, inside every woman, no matter how grown up she is, there is still a frightened little girl.
Sergei Lukyanenko
They destroy lives with work. What for? They rob men of their lives. What for, I ask? My master—I lost my life in the textile mill of Nefidov—my master presented one prima donna with a golden wash basin. Every one of her toilet articles was gold. That basin holds my life-blood, my very life. That's for what my life went! A man killed me with work in order to comfort his mistress with my blood. He bought her a gold wash basin with my blood.
Maxim Gorky
What is realized in the novel is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language, coming to know one's own belief system in someone else's system.
Mikhail Bakhtin
O principal é não mentir. Quem mente para si mesmo e dá ouvido à sua própria mentira chega a tal extremo que não consegue ver nenhuma verdade em si ou naqueles que o rodeiam e, por conseguinte, perde completamente o respeito por si e pelos outros. (...) Quem mente a si próprio pode ser o primeiro a ofender-se. Às vezes, é tão agradável uma pessoa se ofender, não é verdade? O indivíduo sabe que ninguém o injuriou, que tudo não passa de simples invenção, que ele próprio mentiu e exagerou apenas para criar um quadro, para fazer de um grão uma montanha - sabe tudo e, no entanto, se ofende. Ofende-se a ponto se sentir prazer na ofensa e, desse modo, atinge o verdadeiro ódio...
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.
Leo Tolstoy
He's an intelligent man, but it takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
But what can be done, the one who loves must share the fate of the one he loves.
Mikhail Bulgakov
Devices which in some curious new way imitate nature are attractive to simple minds.
Vladimir Nabokov
Without the support from religion--remember, we talked about it--no father, using only his own resources, would be able to bring up a child.
Leo Tolstoy
I realized that the "thing" and the "concept" were substituted for feeling and understood the falsity of the world of will and idea
Kazimir Malevich
In my experience, the ex-military guys came in two types. The first grew long hair, sprouted beards, and indulged in all the things they hadn't been able do while they'd been in the armed forces. The second did their best to pretend they never got out.
Ilona Andrews
Nice passion is reading
Leo Tolstoy
Power without [the people's] confidence is nothing.
Catherine the Great
Satire is a lesson, parody is a game.
Vladimir Nabokov
The wind swept the snow aside, ever faster and thicker, as if it were trying to catch up with something, and Yurii Andreievich stared ahead of him out of the window, as if he were not looking at the snow but were still reading Tonia’s letter and as if what flickered past him were not small dry snow crystals but the spaces between the small black letters, white, white, endless, endless.
Boris Pasternak
I'm afraid that if we move on to such topics, I won't be able to let you go safe and sound.
Olga Goa
From early childhood his mother had taught him that to discuss in public a profound emotional experience-which, in the open air, immediately evanesces and fades, and, oddly, becomes similar to an analogous experience of one's interlocutor-was not only vulgar, but also a sin against sentiment.
Vladimir Nabokov
A great wind is blowing, and that gives you either imagination or a headache.
Catherine the Great
Another circumstance, too, worried me in those days: that there was no one like me and I was unlike anyone else. "I am alone and they are everyone," I thought–and pondered.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
They loved each other, not driven by necessity, by the "blaze of passion" often falsely ascribed to love. They loved each other because everything around them willed it, the trees and the clouds and the sky over their heads and the earth under their feet.
Boris Pasternak
Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it. Laughter is a vital factor in laying down that prerequisite for fearlessness without which it would be impossible to approach the world realistically.
Mikhail Bakhtin
Make the difficult habitual, the habitual easy, and the easy beautiful.
Constantin S. Stanislavski
Do you believe that you will die? Yes man is mortal I am a man ergo... no that isn't what I mean. I know that you know that. What I am asking is, have you ever actually believed it? Believed it completely? Believed not with your mind but with your body? Actually felt that one the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be icy and yellow? No, of course you don't believe it. Which is the reason why up until now you haven't jumped from the tenth floor to the pavement.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
My captive. My wife. My entire world.I will love her to the end of time, and I will never, ever let her go.
Anna Zaires
Everyone's afraid, but I'm not. Because I loved your father my whole life. I still do.
Mikhail Shishkin
Anna Petrovna: I am beginning to think, doctor, that fate has cheated me. The majority of people, who maybe are no better than I am, are happy and pay nothing for that happiness. I have paid for everything, absolutely everything! And how dearly! Why have I paid such terrible interest?
Anton Chekhov
This is Communism's view of war. War is necessary. War is an instrument for achieving a goal.But unfortunately for Communism, this policy ran up against the American atomic bomb in 1945. Then the Communists changed their tactics and suddenly became advocates of peace at any cost.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Profound thoughts arise only in debate, with a possibility of counterargument, only when there is a possibility of expressing not only correct ideas, but also dubious ideas.
Andrei Sakharov
Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once. Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
If what you have done yesterday still looks big to you, you haven't done much today.
Mikhail Gorbachev
Indeed, in that sense we’re all rather often almost like mad people, only with the slight difference that the ‘sick’ are somewhat madder than we are, so that it’s necessary to draw a line here.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Woman is in love with the devil.
Nikolai Gogol
I saw the truth, I saw and I know that people can be beautiful and happy without losing the ability to live on earth. I will not and cannot believe that evil is the normal condition of people.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Do you suppose, gentlemen, that our children as they grow up and begin to reason can avoid such questions? No, they cannot, and we will not impose on them an impossible restriction. The sight of an unworthy father involuntarily suggests tormenting questions to a young creature, especially when he compares him with the excellent fathers of his companions. The conventional answer to this question is: 'He begot you, and you are his flesh and blood, and therefore you are bound to love him.' The youth involuntarily reflects: 'But did he love me when he begot me?' he asks, wondering more and more. 'Was it for my sake he begot me? He did not know me, not even my sex, at that moment, at the moment of passion, perhaps, inflamed by wine, and he has only transmitted to me a propensity to drunkenness- that's all he's done for me.... Why am I bound to love him simply for begetting me when he has cared nothing for me all my life after?Oh, perhaps those questions strike you as coarse and cruel, but do not expect an impossible restraint from a young mind. 'Drive nature out of the door and it will fly in at the window'.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Wealth and power and life, all that men build up and guard with such effort, is only worth anything through the joy with which it can all be cast away.
Leo Tolstoy
How we react to the tragedy of one small person accurately reflects our attitude towards a whole nationality, and increasing the numbers doesn't change much.
Anna Politkovskaya
Literature, real literature, must not be gulped down like some potion which may be good for the heart or good for the brain — the brain, that stomach of the soul. Literature must be taken and broken to bits, pulled apart, squashed — then its lovely reek will be smelt in the hollow of the palm, it will be munched and rolled upon the tongue with relish; then, and only then, its rare flavor will be appreciated at its true worth and the broken and crushed parts will again come together in your mind and disclose the beauty of a unity to which you have contributed something of your own blood.
Vladimir Nabokov
I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled. Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value. Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them.
Boris Pasternak
… What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusionary -property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life -don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn for happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes can see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart -and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted on their memory.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
My wretched passions were acute, smarting, from my continual, sickly irritability I had hysterical impulses, with tears and convulsions. I had no resource except reading, that is, there was nothing in my surroundings which I could respect and which attracted me. I was overwhelmed with depression, too; I had an hysterical craving for incongruity and for contrast, and so I took to vice.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
...what will happen to us this night will resemble a flame consuming the icy desert, a shower of stars reflected in a piece of a mirror that in the darkness suddenly fell out of its frame to warn its owner about the proximity of death. It'll resemble the shepherd's pipe and the music that has not been written yet.
Sasha Sokolov
I believe he was feeling a bit nervous. Possibly it was my costume that took him aback. I was dressed quite well, even elegantly, and looked as if I belonged to the best society.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I believe that we are always attracted to what we need most an instinct leading us towards the persons who are to open new vistas in our lives and fill them with new knowledge.
Helene Iswolsky
Oh, gentlemen, perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because throughout my entire life I've never been able to start or finish anything. Granted, granted I'm a babbler, a harmless, irksome babbler, as we all are. But what's to be done if the sole and express purpose of every intelligent man is babble--that is, a deliberate pouring from empty into void.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Many of us humans have a hard time with understanding one simple truth: the surest way to get love is to start giving love to others. Often, when we desperately need some companionship, understanding and warmth from those who are around us, we chose to blame, shout, criticize, accuse, insult and set ultimatums. But in reply, we only encounter with cold walls of estrangement which was diligently built by our own efforts, farcical walls and fences.
Sahara Sanders
Now, think of a square, a living, beautiful square. And imagine that it must tell you about itself, about its life. You understand, a square would scarcely ever think of telling you that all its four angles are equal: this has become so natural, so ordinary to it that it's simply no longer consciously aware of it. And so with me: I find myself continually in this square's position.
Zamyatin Yevgeny
One's writing is good only when the intelligence and the imagination are in equilibrium. As soon as one of them overbalances the other, it's all up; you may as well throw it away and begin afresh.
Leo Tolstoy